Mark Bennett

As a leading player in the mining industry, Sirius Resources has experienced stunning growth over the past year.

In July 2012, Sirius Resources was down to its last half million dollars after three years of exploration. With a share value of 5.7 cents, the company looked like it was on its last legs. However, one amazing nickel–copper sulphide discovery, known as the Nova deposit, radically changed the company’s fortunes. Since then, CEO and Managing Director of Sirius Resources Mark Bennett has seen the company hit a market capitalisation of $1.04 billion and deliver amazing drilling results. The CEO Magazine sat down with Mark to discuss Sirius Resources’ rags-to-riches story.

"Two young geologists and I set ourselves a goal of raising money and spending three years exploring and finding something that would be the catalyst for growth within that three-year period. Rather than going to an established mining area where there is a lot of mining activity, we said we’d do the extreme high-risk, high-reward thing and go to an entirely new area and look for a giant deposit. The chances of success are incredibly small, but our goal was to find something that would result in returns—that would be ten- or a hundredfold rather than just incremental returns".

"We decided to give ourselves three years. We got down to our last half million dollars, and in two years and eleven months we made the discovery—so we just scraped it in".

"The details of the story are quite interesting as well. It was our last drill program, and we didn’t have much money left in the bank. We had a lot of rain, the rig was stranded, it was costing us money, and it was our last roll of the dice".